Atom Egoyan - Director

Nationality:
Canadian.
Born:
Cairo, Egypt, 19 July 1960; immigrated to Canada, 1962; naturalized
Canadian citizen.
Education:
Trinity College, University of Toronto, B.A., 1982.
Family:
Married Arsinee Khanjian (an actress); son: Arshile.
Career:
Associated with Playwrights Unit in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; director of
Ego Film Arts in Toronto, 1982—; director of episodes of television
shows such as
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, 1985,
Twilight Zone
, 1985,
Friday the 13th
, 1987, and
Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach
, 1997; director of stage productions, including
Salome
, 1996; member of jury, Cannes International Film Festival, 1996.
Awards:
Grant from University of Toronto's Hart House Film Board; prize
from Canadian National Exhibition's film festival, for Howard in
Particular; grants from Canadian Council and Ontario Arts Council; Gold
Ducat Award, Mannheim International Film Week Festival, 1984, for Next of
Kin; Toronto City Award for excellence in a Canadian production, Toronto
Film Festival, 1987, International Critics Award for Best Feature Film,
Uppsala Film Festival, 1988, and Priz Alcan from Festival du Nouveau
Cinema, 1988, all for
Family Viewing
; prize for best screenplay, Vancouver International Film Festival, 1989,
for
Speaking Parts
; Special Jury Prize, Moscow Film Festival, Golden Spike, Vallodolid Film
Festival, Toronto City Award, Toronto Film Festival, and award for best
Canadian film, Sudbury Film Festival, all 1991, all for
The Adjuster
; Golden Gate Award, San Francisco Film Festival, 1992, for
Gross Misconduct
; prize for best film in "new cinema," International Jury
for At Cinema and prize from Berlin International Film Festival, both
1994, both for Calendar; Genie awards for best picture, best director, and
best writer, International Film Critics Award, Cannes Film Festival, Prix
de la Critique for best foreign film, and Toronto City Award, Toronto
International Film Festival, all 1994, all for
Exotica.
Address:
Ego Film Arts, 80 Niagara St., Toronto, Ontario M5V 1C5, Canada.

Interview with S. B. Katz, in
Written By
(Los Angeles), vol. 2, February 1998.

On EGOYAN: articles—

24 Images
, Summer 1989.

Film Comment
, November-December 1989.

New Statesman and Society
, 22 September 1989.

Nation
, 13 July 1992.

Maclean's
, 3 October 1994.

Nation
, 21 March 1994.

Entertainment Weekly
, 24 March 1995.

Film Comment
, November-December 1995.

Film Comment
, January-February 1998.

The Observer
, 9 April 1995.

The Observer
, 28 September 1997

Positif
, special section, October 1997.

Kino
(Warsaw), February 1998.

* * *

Given Atom Egoyan's background and family history, the chief
preoccupations of his films might seem all but inevitable. Born in Cairo
to Armenian parents, he was taken to Canada as a child and grew up in
Victoria, British Columbia, a town so full of British

Atom Egoyan

expatriates it seemed like a colonial outpost. While he was still a child
his father, an artist, began an extra-marital affair with a woman whose
three children were all fatally ill. Small wonder if his films deal so
insistently with problems of ethnic identity, broken families, alienation,
loss, and death.

Add to these themes, at least in his earlier films, an uneasy fascination
with the role of visual media in the modern world. Video in particular
serves for Egoyan's characters as an escape route, a form of
do-it-yourself therapy that allows them to evade the unsatisfactory
reality around them. In
Family Viewing
a husband and wife lie semi-naked side by side, neither touching nor
speaking, grimly watching videos of their earlier couplings that the man
has taped over scenes of his son's childhood. When not viewing
tapes, he calls up phone-sex lines. Two female characters in
Speaking Parts
, obsessed with a wannabe actor (and part-time gigolo), spend more time
watching him on video than in the flesh. In
The Adjuster
, Egoyan's most dreamlike and elusive film, a censor secretly
videotapes the porn films she's being shown—experience at
third hand.

Repeatedly, Egoyan's characters try to reconstruct reality to fit
their own yearnings. The protagonist of his first feature,
Next of Kin
, bored with his own bland WASP background, reinvents himself as the
long-lost son of an expatriate Armenian family, It's typical of
Egoyan's deadpan humour that the young man is accepted without
question, though not looking remotely Armenian. Identity is a charade, and
not even a well-acted one.

Elliptical and enigmatic, intricately structured, Egoyan's films
have sometimes been called cold and contrived; though as Kent Jones notes,
objecting to Egoyan's work being contrived "is a little like
reprimanding Monet for his loose brushwork or dismissing Schoenberg for
being atonal." As for "coldness," Egoyan resolutely
shuns sentimentality, even when dealing with so emotive a subject as the
death of children, but there's a soulful, troubled melancholy to
his films that's counterbalanced, but never cancelled out, by a
concurrent sense of the absurd. This ambiguity of tone can often be
unsettling, an effect the director fully intends. He stresses that his
films are "designed to make the viewer self-conscious. I revel in
that . . . . The viewer has to invest themself in what they're
seeing because then the emotions you are able to engage in are that much
stronger."

The films often touch on disturbing territory—voyeurism, incest,
paedophilia—and with their fragmented structure, give up their
secrets only gradually. Sometimes, as in
Exotica
, a mordant study of need and exploitation set largely in a strip club,
it's not until the final
moments that we realise the full significance of what we've been
watching—and not always even then. This mirrors the troubled
outlook of his characters who rarely see anything whole, least of all
themselves. Hilditch, lonely serial killer of lonely girls in
Felicia's Journey
, never thinks of himself as a monster. In his own eyes he's the
kindest of men—just as Noah Render, the eponymous insurance man in
The Adjuster
, believes he's acting out of pure compassion in sexually
exploiting his clients.

To date, Egoyan's most explicit statement of the cultural and
emotional dislocation central to all his films comes in
Calendar
, where he ironically casts himself as a photographer visiting Armenia who
loses his wife (played by Egoyan's own wife, actress Arsinde
Khanjian) to a handsome guide. The film is at once funny and desolate,
seemingly simple (by Egoyan's standards) in its structure yet
teasingly oblique. Khanjian is one of a number of actors (others include
David Hemblen, Elias Koteas, Bruce Greenwood and Maury Chaikin) who
constantly recur in Egoyan's films, reinforcing the sense of a
hermetic, inward-looking world. Venues are typically bland and
drab—featureless modern hotels and offices figure
frequently—without much intimation of life going on beyond the
edges of the screen. Even when he portrays a community, such as the small
provincial township of
The Sweet Hereafter
, there's little sense of social cohesion: all the houses seem
remote from each other, with each person or family trapped in their own
separate universe.

The Sweet Hereafter
and its successor,
Felicia's Journey
, marked a departure in Egoyan's career, adapting material by
others (novels by Russell Banks and William Trevor) instead of working to
his own original scripts. Both films are sensitively crafted, keeping
faith with their originals while further exploring his perennial themes of
loss and disaffection. ("All my characters," he observes,
"have had missing people in their lives.") In
Felicia's Journey
, what's more, Egoyan intriguingly maps his bleak, sardonic poetry
on to the suburbs and industrial complexes of Birmingham. But the
incorporation of other authorial sensibilities into his work seems to
dilute the mix rather than enriching it; neither film achieves the
intensity, or the complexity, of
The Adjuster
or
Exotica.
A vision as potent and idiosyncratic as that of Egoyan is perhaps best
taken neat.